Adidas And Foot Locker Are Asking Young Designers To Help Them Make New Sneakers

Adidas is enlisting some new partners in its ongoing effort to upend the economics of sneaker production with its automated, super-fast “Speedfactories” in the U.S. and Germany. The athletic brand has teamed up with the sneaker retailer Foot Locker, and together the companies will seek input from consumers at different “cultural events and sport moments” throughout the year to quickly create batches of “consumer-inspired” sneakers. The companies will bring in select young designers and consumers for “intimate” design sessions to co-create some of the new shoes, an Adidas spokesperson said. The forthcoming lots of sneakers will be part of Adidas’s AM4 line—as in “Adidas made for”—which have so far been mostly tailored to the specific needs of running communities in various cities. The goal is to let local communities in on the creative process to make “hyperlocal” products, and Adidas says that because it is producing the shoes in its Atlanta Speedfactory, which was designed around digitized processes and automation, it will be able to deliver them “up to 36 times faster than standard industry production times.” Read more at Quartz.